Forthcoming book: Hatem Bazian – Palestine … it’s something colonial

In 1902 Theoder Herzl, founder of political Zionism, wrote to Great Britain’s Minister of Colonies Cecil Rhodes stating: “You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.” Palestine is the last settler colonial project to be commissioned in the late 19th early 20th centuries and still unfolding as we enter into the 21st Century.

In centering Palestine’s modern history around settler colonial discourses Dr. Bazian provides a framework to understand and relate to the unfolding events from the late 19th century up to the present in a clear and unambiguous way. Zionism settler colonialism has salient features such as the normative deployment violence, religious justification, having a garrison state to sponsor it, transforming the land and geography and constituting a new colonial epistemology related to it as well as the expulsion and negating the existence of an indigenous population. The book offers a theoretical basis for approaching Palestine as a subject without falling into pitfalls of internationally supported ‘peace process’ that on the one hand affirms the settler colonial rights, problematizes the colonialized and dispenses with the ramifications.